• kromem@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I dunno - at first it was promising, but today I was actually thinking of leaving Lemmy and trying to find a larger site.

    I’m not sure if the entire Internet has somehow become addicted to groupthink or if this is just a symptom of Lemmy’s smaller size and a selection bias, but it’s been getting worse and worse over the past nine months and it’s definitely turning me off to the community here.

    What I loved about Reddit was that on any given story you saw a number of well informed opinions debating the nuances of those opinions. You’d learn so much more by engaging with the comments than just reading the article itself.

    But here it seems more and more to be turning into a confirmation bias machine, where discourse and nuance takes a back seat to conformity to locally populist narratives. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been downvoted for linking to multiple recent research papers (from places like Harvard and MIT) because the implication of those papers was contrary to popularly held beliefs here.

    While I’ve had a few good interactions, it’s become less and less of a signal to noise ratio on those interactions.

    It’s possible this is a larger trend, but I haven’t noticed it to nearly the same degree on other less generalized forums I spend my time, so I suspect it’s just a Lemmy thing.

    A shame, as I think the tech is outstanding. But as is often the case, good tech is only part of a product, and in the case of social media it’s the community too, and I’ve been growing increasingly disappointed in Lemmy’s community who likes to pat themselves on the back for a welcoming spirit with the apparent unmentioned footnote in small print that it’s a welcoming spirit that only extends to people regurgitating their own opinions back to them.

    • Omega_Haxors
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      9 months ago

      Redditors aren’t used to communists not being actively suppressed while fascists get passively protected and it shows. All you’re saying here is that you prefer the one narrative reddit forced onto everyone with their moderating and astrotruf, and being exposed to different ideas makes you feel uncomfortable. You’re always welcome to go back to the race-baiting and fascist propaganda, sounds like you’d be happier there.

      Lemmy is a collection of differing voices from all over the federation, so your “there’s no diversity of thought” sounds like when conservatives mald that their terrible ideas aren’t well received the moment they step out of their racist circlejerk. To the white, equality feels like oppression.

      • communism
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        9 months ago

        It’s strange because that person’s from lemmy.world? That seems like a pretty liberal/reddity instance from what I’ve seen. I was gonna tell them to go to another instance if they don’t like .ml’s politics but then I saw theyre not even from .ml lol

        • Omega_Haxors
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          9 months ago

          Yeah that’s why I went as hard as I did. LW’s somewhat of a nazi bar so that paints a picture of the kind of person we’re dealing with here. I could just imagine their head popping like a gasket if they ever ran into a hexbear or lemmygrad user who could hard counter their shit.

          EDIT: I looked into them and honestly not the worst i’ve seen. They’re very reddit-poisoned but I bet a year or two off and they’ll be fine.

      • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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        9 months ago

        the problem with lemmy is your either a communist or fascist, with no in-between. it’s this rediculius polarisation that makes it not very fruitful to have actual conversations around here

        • Omega_Haxors
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          9 months ago

          It’s the main reason I gravitate so much towards lemmygrad. Their zero-tolerance stance on fash shit (plus being defederated from literally every problem instance by dint of being openly communist) allows you to have actual conversations with people without having to explain basic morality every three seconds. They’re pretty tolerant of differing ideas as long as you’re not parroting fascist talking points and even then they’ll usually put in a good faith attempt to explain why what you’re saying is fucked up and give you a chance to self-correct.

          Sadly a lot of the federation is a lot less good about this, where anything even remotely political turns into a debate/slapfight where nobody feels good at the end of it and nothing really gets done. Some people are just useless trolls who shouldn’t be engaged; not to mention the groups actively trying to balkanize the federation.

          Plus if you think this place is bad. Mastodon… I made a post about them earlier but if you respond to any post without heaping praise you just get instantly blocked. They’re a great platform but good god is the culture there just obscenely toxic to conversation.

    • frostmore@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      tell me about it.

      my exchanges so far has led me to think the left leaning extremists are populating lemmy because they are still angry at spaz for his dumbfuckery.

      else it’s beginning feel like reddit all over again.